Time and Time Again

37

FOR THE FOLLOWING week Stanton remained in the little apartment speedily regaining his strength. Bernadette shopped for him and cooked for him and cared for him and every night they made love.

And it was love. Stanton knew that. He was in love with another woman. Something he’d never imagined was possible.

Bernadette sensed his guilt.

‘You feel like you’ve betrayed your wife, don’t you?’ she said in the small hours of one morning, sitting up in bed smoking her post-coital cigarette.

‘I’m sorry,’ he replied. ‘Is it so obvious?’

‘Only when you go quiet like this.’ The window was open as the summer had remained glorious and moonlight flooded the room, falling on her pale skin so that she seemed almost luminous. ‘You are allowed to have sex, you know. I mean, I don’t think that’s wrong. She’s been gone quite a long time.’

‘It’s not the sex,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think Cassie would mind me having sex with another woman. Particularly such a nice person as you.’

‘Well, then, what would she mind?’

‘I’m wondering if she’d mind me falling in love with you?’

Bernadette drew deeply on her cigarette. He watched her breasts rise as her chest expanded.

‘Oh right, I see,’ she said. ‘Are you falling in love with me, then?’

‘Actually I think I already have done.’

‘Well, that’s a very good thing,’ she replied, ‘because I’m in love with you too.’ She reached out and put her arms around him. ‘And I don’t think Cassie would mind that either because she loved you and you loved her, and if there’s a heaven then she knows that she’s dead and you’re alive and must live your span, and that nothing that happens to you now in any way diminishes what you once had with her and will always have had with her.’

Stanton knew that he was at the second major emotional junction of his life.

The first had been meeting and marrying Cassie. Some people speak of finding love as ‘completing’ them. He’d seen films where the phrase ‘You complete me’ was offered as some great statement of romance. He’d never seen love that way, as some kind of minor adjunct to his own personality. The love he’d felt for Cassie hadn’t completed him, it had created him. Before that, as far as he was concerned, there hadn’t been much to complete. He could scarcely remember himself or his life prior to Cassie. He knew that his mum had died when he was a teenager. That he’d been to schools and found some sort of family in the cadets and joined the army, which had become his life. But you can’t just be a soldier, you have to be a person too, a rounded human being who feels they have a place in the world, and Stanton had only begun to feel like such a person when he met Cassie. Her love for him had brought him into being.

And now had come the second junction. It hadn’t occurred on the morning he arrived in 1914, massive in its significance though that moment had been. Significant to the world, but not to him. He had been the same person who had struggled with Professor McCluskey and the Turkish party girl moments earlier in another century. He had brought his grief and his emptiness with him across time and Cassie’s absence had continued to define him every bit as much as her presence had done. But not now. Now quite suddenly he felt he could let go.

‘Can I have one of those cigarettes?’ he said.

Bernadette had just lit one for herself and so took it from her lips and put it between his. As she leant forward her breasts presented themselves inches before his face and he wanted more than anything to kiss them. So he took but one puff on the cigarette before leaving it smoking in the ashtray and once more they made love.

And afterwards they drank the bottle of strawberry schnapps that Stanton had opened on the night of the Kaiser’s death. And they finished it and made drunken love, which fortunately didn’t open Stanton’s wound because it was now almost completely healed. Then afterwards Bernadette found that she had some brandy in her bag and they began on that and got very drunk and smoked more cigarettes and laughed and teased each other.

And Stanton realized that he wanted more than anything on earth to tell her who he was.

What he was.

He’d been so very alone with his secret and he was still alone. More so in a way because how could he pretend he shared a love if the person he loved knew nothing about him? How could they be as one if their relationship was so fatally imbalanced by deceit?

She’d know in the end. Not his secret, of course; it would take a wizard to guess that. But that he had a secret. A huge secret and one he was keeping from her. She’d know – girls always knew – and it would poison whatever love they had.

Then Bernadette spoke and he knew he was right.

She had been thinking the same thing.

‘But if we do love each other,’ she said, ‘and we do love each other – I know you love me by the way you love me – but if we’re to keep on loving each other, then –’ she paused to take a sip of her brandy – ‘you’ll have to tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’ Stanton asked, although he knew the answer.

‘The same question I asked you in Vienna. Who are you, Hugh? How is it that you’ve left no trace? You’re a big, handsome, muscular, capable man. An exceptional man. I’m pretty sure most men would like you and I’m damn certain most women would want you. And yet you’ve left no trace at all. Your name and description were in all the papers appealing for relatives or friends and nobody but me came forward and you met me only weeks ago.’

‘Anyone can assume a false name,’ Stanton said.

‘But the description? And the photos? All published in England, as I’m quite sure they were in Australia. And yet no one came forward. Not one good old honest gold-miner from the Australian outback ran to the local cops and said, “He’s our mate! Telegraph Berlin!” Nobody, Hugh. You very nearly died, you lay in hospital for two weeks at death’s door all alone, and nobody cared but me. Your wife may be dead and I believe that from the bottom of my heart. I’ve seen the pain on your face. But did your parents die too? Did hers? Did your whole family? School pals? Friends at work? Army comrades? Members of the local cricket club? Landlords? Old girlfriends? The chap who sold you your morning paper? The next-door neighbour? Are they all dead? Is everyone you have ever met in your life dead? Am I truly the only person on earth who knows you, Hugh?’

What could he tell her? What possible explanation could he offer for the question she was asking, which was, after all, so very fair?

That he’d been brought up by wolves?

There was no explanation but the truth.

Perhaps it was the booze. He’d had more of it than her and his tolerance would have been lowered through his recent abstinence.

Maybe there were still traces in his system of the drugs he’d been given at the hospital, making him a little delirious.

Perhaps it was simply the exhilaration of finally being able to love again.

Or maybe he was just sick to death of being the only person who knew.

Whatever it was, at that moment Stanton felt he had no choice. If he tried to lie, she’d know in an instant, and in that same instant their love would be destroyed. If he wanted to keep Bernadette Burdette, he would have to give her an answer. And since any lie that could possibly cover the situation would sound every bit as fantastical as the truth, there seemed to him to be no debate.

‘Yes, Bernie,’ he said, ‘you are truly the only person on earth who knows me. And that’s because … I have come from the future.’

She was silent for a minute.

‘Darling,’ she said finally, and it was the first time she’d ever called him that, ‘that was very slightly funny. But only very slightly. And anyway it wouldn’t matter how funny it was because I wouldn’t laugh because this isn’t a joke. I mean it. You have to tell me who you are or else who am I to imagine it is that says he loves me?’

‘Bernie, it’s true. I come from the future. From a different version of history. I came to change history.’

And he told her. The whole story. Beginning with the Christmas Eve on which he’d joined the Companions. He told her about his own century, or at least a little, a world of revolutions and genocide, of telephones in people’s pockets and bubble-gum and environmental destruction. He told her about the history he’d come to change. About the death of the Archduke and the catastrophe of global war that followed. He told her about Isaac Newton’s legacy and he told her about the plan that had been laid to change history.

She tried to stop him. She tried to shut him up, threatening that she’d leave him that very night if he insisted on such lies. But he begged her to listen. He poured more brandy and he drank his down in one and poured another. He locked the door and held tight to the key. He told her he loved her and that she had to understand.

And he told her that it was he who had assassinated the Kaiser.

And seeing her eyes go wide in horror he told her about the Great War and the carnage it wrought and how it had been the Kaiser’s war and that he had to be stopped and that millions of lives had been saved. He told her how he was horrified at the way things were turning out in Berlin but he still believed from the bottom of his heart that he had done the right thing.

‘I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you with the technology of the future. I’ll show you pictures of what I’ve prevented. I’ll read you heart-breaking poems that will never now need to be written.’

But as he went to get the smaller of his bags in which he kept the laptop hidden in a book, she stopped him.

‘No, Hugh,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen inside that bag, remember? Show me what’s in the bigger bag. If you love me, show me that.’

And so Stanton took his keys and opened the larger of his two bags and inside were a number of strange-looking guns and packages. And also, broken into three parts, were the unmistakable components of a telescopically sighted sniper’s rifle.

Bernadette stared at the gun for a long time in silence.

‘I believe you, Hugh,’ she whispered, holding out her arms. ‘Thank you. Thank you for telling me everything. You told me because you love me and I listened because I love you. And now I know. There’s two of us now, Hugh. Two people in the world who truly know you.’

And he went to her and lay down on the bed in her arms.

‘So shall we be together?’ he asked. ‘Will you help me begin again? Share your life with me? Help me build one for myself?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll begin tomorrow.’

‘I have one last thing I need to do,’ he told her. ‘One last duty to the Companions of Chronos. I’ve decided I have to go back. Back to where I emerged into this century and leave a letter. A letter that describes the history I prevented. The Great War that I stopped. Because it’s just possible that a hundred and eleven years from now another traveller will go to that cellar in Istanbul about to embark on a mission to adjust the history of this century. Maybe somehow in this loop of time the cellar will still be locked in 2025 and they’ll find my warning, a warning of how much worse things could be. A warning to think twice before it’s too late. It’s a long shot but then everything in my life is … not least meeting you.’

‘Shhh,’ she said, ‘shh. That’s enough now. You’ve told me everything. It’s time to sleep.’

Her voice was so musical. He loved it so.

He closed his eyes.

An immense burden lifted from his shoulders. He laid his head against her naked breasts and listened to her heart beat. He was no longer alone.

And in her arms he slept.

And she held him close and he drifted in and out of sleep and when he woke she held him closer and kissed him and she put her cigarette between his lips and he smiled and once more he slept. At peace for the first time since the day of the hit-and-run in Primrose Hill that took away his life.

A deep and contented sleep.

When he woke next it was dawn and there was light coming through the open window.

He felt cold.

And he was alone.

Bernadette was not in the bed.